There have been prior art attempts to control the shape of cooked shrimp in such a manner that there is a reduction in the curling that cooked shrimp meat exhibits after cooking. Thus, for example, Hice U.S. Pat. No. 3,540,369, Nov. 17, 1970 discloses specially shaped shrimp cooking trays which are placed in a cooker. The trays have either a shaped wire mesh shrimp retaining and shaping platform configuration or a set of relatively large diameter cylindrical stems about which shrimp are placed for cooking with the stems covered by a mesh screen for holding completely shelled shrimp in a configuration during cooking that prevents the shrimp from coiling into tight circles. However, these trays must be removed from a cooker and handled to dump the shrimp and in general are not subject to automated cooking procedures where commercial quantities are required, and are thus limited to those applications where small quantities of shrimp are hand loaded and cooked, such as in homes or restaurants. Furthermore they are not suitable for cooking fully or partly shelled shrimp.
The Chauvin U.S. Pat. No. 3,581,652, Jun. 1, 1971 uses a conveyor belt-cooker system for producing cooked shrimp in a generally straight or slightly curled condition. This requires the squeezing of shrimp between two tightly stretched conveyor belts to retain them firmly in position during cooking. The upper belt is weighted down to increase holding pressure for maintaining an originally straight shrimp tightly clamped in that condition throughout cooking over a controlled speed cooking cycle so that the cooked shrimp are substantially straight.
However this method has significant disadvantages of merging two conveyor belts, maintaining heavy pressure on top of the shrimp, preventing normal and natural expansion of the meat during cooking, blocking and reducing steam flow passages about the shrimp while cooking, and misshaping or branding and possibly tearing the shrimp during the conveyance procedure.
It is therefore an objective of this invention to provide improved shrimp cooking methods and apparatus for overcoming the disadvantages of the prior art.
It is a further object of the invention to provide high grade J-shaped cocktail shrimp of good appearance and texture in a high volume commercial processing method.
Another object of the invention is to provide improved methods and apparatus for cooking shrimp in a substantially J-shaped configuration.